Practice makes perfect, and blue feels better than green. (Skip to the end if you don't wanna hear an interesting story)

A while ago, I made a post about almost being specialist. After a month of getting stuck on pupil, I was starting to think I was not fit to advance in my competitive programming journey. Doubts fell like droplets on a rainy day...

But I still practiced... Day after day I would do my daily dose of problems, learning cool new algorithms along the way. Maybe DSU? BFS? DP? Probabilities? Every day I was equipping my toolbelt for the journey. Every day I would challenge myself to a slightly harder task. Although I had to admit, in the back of my head, I was wondering when I will ever use these Data Structures and Algorithms.

Then the day came. In today's contest (Round #736 Div1+Div2), I briskly solved A (as I usually do) and took my time on B. (it was implementation, so it was a little annoying). Then I met C.

C was an interesting graph problem. I was thinking, dfs and brute force, but I saw that N was up to 1e5 so it wasn't possible. Then I found some crucial observations. I realized every update only changes the answer by 1. Then I found that I could make the problem a directed graph. More observations followed. Soon, I simplified from an O(n^2) algorithm that involved simulation to an easy greedy O(n) solution. Oh man. I loved it.

Then I found D, D was interesting. A twist from problem A. After a bit of doodling and writing testcases, I found myself using RMQs (or sparse tables). I barely cared for RMQs, and thought I would never need them, but the algorithm needed an O(1) GCD query, so maybe just maybe it was right. And it was.

After the contest I realized I was top 700, I was so happy. It was worth it in the end. Challenge yourself, and high ratings will come.

If you are stuck in pupil or newbie, the most common reason is you aren't challenging yourself. Do harder problems and most of all, have fun with it. It's going to be a long ride, so might as well enjoy it.

If you are better than me and have a higher rating, I hope you smiled at this blog post, and watch out, because I may even pass you soon.

As always, Happy Coding!!

Also my tags aren't going to be bad, I'll just put #contest or something generic, so it's not instagram-like